What If Anti-Zionists Had Been Successful? Here's Zionism Exposed

 Nadene Goldfoot                                           

   Aluf (General) Bar Kokhba (132-135) holding Jerusalem for 3 years from Romans, holding off world's best army and making them very angry had almost regained their capital city of Jerusalem. Jews had been defeated by the occupying Romans in 70, and Bar Kokhba was the first to put everything he had mustered into regaining their land;  and he failed.  Others would not take his place for another 1,891 years and it would be a movement of Jews called Zionism.  

You could say he was the first Zionist;  and did hold Jerusalem for its people for 3 years.  It was a rarity.  Never had anyone overcome the Romans in battle.  Simeon Bar Kokhba died in 135.  He was believed to be the nephew of Rabbi Eliezar of Modiin and his reputation was of Davidic descent.   He had led the revolt against Emperor Hadrian in 132.  It was in 133 that Rome counterattacked with an army of 35,000 and commander Julius Severus.  The Romans took 50 fortresses and 985 villages; causing 580,000 Jewish casualties while other Jews died from hunger and disease during this time.  Judea fell into desolation.  Jerusalem became a heathen city where Jews were again barred as they were in 70.  

Jews had been returning to Palestine individually all along history though the Romans made it plain that they were to stay away for fear of death.  The land of Judah had been taken over by Romans and called Judea, then after Bar Kokhba held Jerusalem for 3 years from 132 to 135 CE, it was renamed by the victors, the Romans, as Palestine.  No one lived there.  The land suffered, becoming marshy, mosquito-and weed filled.  

 “arid plains, hills”. MARK TWAIN, who took an excursion trip to "the Holy Land, Egypt, the Crimea, Greece, and other points from Brooklyn on February 1, 1867.  This was a journalist who vetted the condition of Palestine and told who was living there.  

"A land of desolate dusty roads, arid plains, hills and mountains, devoid of people and shade, miserable clay houses, pestilential swamps. 

A photo of Joseph’s Tomb in Nablus from 1865 shows a wretched ruin (the Palestinians did not then know that it was one of the Jews' holy sites) in a barren environment. The Arab cities, those to which the Palestinians want to return by virtue of the “Right to Return”, are small settlements – Jaffa, Haifa, Acre, Nazareth.                            

 Everything that can be concluded from the map of the British Expedition is apparent, black on white, in actual real-time photographs".

As Jews suffered in the hands of others in different countries, you would see that a few Jews would return to their homeland.  Jews never forgot their homeland, and prayed 3 times a day for their return.  They had their Torah which told of their history and the land that some of them continued to live in, land the Romans overlooked and places in Jerusalem unknown to Romans.   They returned, finding there were still Jews alive and living in pockets that the Romans didn't care about.   

1881 was the date of the First Aliyah, when hundreds of Jews came as a group, immigrating to Palestine. Pogroms, organized massacres of Jews, sweep through the Russian Empire through 1884. This includes the Kiev Pogrom, considered the worst in this wave. Authorities made no attempts to stop the violence against Jews that lasted months. The flow of Jews to cities in the Russian Empire turned into a flood. Jews began to leave the Pale of the Settlement and move to Odessa; many of those Jews then continued onto New York. 

 Eliezer ben Yehuda, the father of modern Hebrew, moves to Palestine in 1881 and starts efforts to revive the Hebrew language.  Born Eliezer Yitzhak Perlman, 7 January 1858 – 16 December 1922 in  Luzhki (Belarusian: Лужкі (Lužki), Vilna Governorate of the Russian Empire (now Vitebsk Oblast, Belarus) to Yehuda Leib and Tzipora Perlman, who were Chabad hasidim,  he was a Russian–⁠Jewish linguist, grammarian, and journalist, renowned as the lexicographer of the first Hebrew dictionary, and the editor of HaZvi, one of the first Hebrew newspapers published in the Land of Israel/Palestine. He was the main driving force behind the revival of the Hebrew language.

 There were 5 aliyote, 5 groups of Jews throughout the coming years of Jews escaping the pogroms of Russia.                            

                              

Dr. Nathan Birnbaum, 1901. (Courtesy of The Nathan and Solomon Birnbaum Archives, Toronto.) "Ziionism's Forgotten Father"  

In 1893, Nathan Birnbaum (1864-1937) coined the term, "Zionism." Zion was one of the names of Jerusalem going back to the Babylonian Exile of 597 BCE and 586 BCE.  He was a political and philosophical writer born in Vienna of a Hasidic family.  He studied law but had turned to journalism.  By 1882 he was advocating Jewish nationalism, using Zionist in his writing.  Birnbaum was one of the founders of the Jewish students nationalist society "Kadimah" which means "Forward" in 1883.    His writings evolved a basis for Zionist ideology several years before the appearance of Herzl on the Jewish scene.    While most of the people who made up Vienna’s Jewish community of more than 100,000 were anything but Jewish nationalists, the city had for more than a decade been home to a small group known as the Kadimah Society, whose members proudly identified themselves as Zionists. The very word “Zionism” was, in fact, the invention of the central figure in this society, the editor of its newspaper, Nathan Birnbaum.

               

 Benjamin Ze'ev Herzl  was his birth name.  Herzl, Tivadar, then  Theodor Herzl (2 May 1860 – 3 July 1904) was an Austro-Hungarian Jewish lawyer, journalist, playwright, political activist, and writer who was the father of modern political Zionism. Herzl formed the Zionist Organization and promoted Jewish immigration to Palestine in an effort to form a Jewish state.  To immigrate to the ancient Homeland, now called Palestine, is to make Aliyah.  Aliyah (US: /ˌæliˈɑː/, UK: /ˌɑː-/; Hebrew: עֲלִיָּה ʿălīyyā, lit. 'ascent') is the immigration of Jews from the diaspora to, historically, the geographical Land of Israel, which is in the modern era chiefly represented by the State of Israel.  We in the USA or Europe are living in the diaspora.  We wish to rise , to go up, to live in Israel.  

And if anti-Zionists had been successful and had kept Israel from being created, what changes would have occurred?  What would have caused Theodor Hertzl to stay home instead of attending the first Zionist Congress in 1897?  Nothing could have. 

    In here are Theodor Herzl and Chaim Weizmann, others

 This Zionist Congress established the political aspirations of being the National Home in Palestine guaranteed by the Public Law (Basle Program).  Zionism proceeds from the assumption that the Jews are still a people, a nation, many of whom cannot  or will not assimilate themselves  to other peoples, and wish to retain their identity as a national community.  

 Herzl was a Jewish Hellenist journalist  born in Budapest, studied in Vienna (1878-1884) who devoted himself to free-lance writing from 1885 onward who had achieved success as a social dramatist.  From 1891 to 1895 he was the Paris correspondent for the Vienna Neue Freie Presse.  It was then that he became increasingly interested in the Jewish problem. 

He advocated for assimilation as the solution, but his drama, Das Neue Ghetto  that he wrote in 1894 expressed his reversion from this view. He had seen the errors of his thinking.   He would not be against assimilation, though  it might have stopped Zionism which had a good start.                         

The Jewish plight that was coming to a head at this point in time would have to continue.  Dreyfus's trial in the Dreyfus Affair in 1894 and decision to leave him on the island as his punishment would have continued with no one.   caring.    He had written about his interview with Baron de Hirsch in 1895, afterwards moved to write his Der Judenstaat ("The Jewish State,"published in 1896.   showing the French Jews the need for their ancient Palestinian Homeland.  Alfred Dreyfus was a 35-year-old Alsatian French artillery officer of Jewish descent. He was falsely convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment for communicating French military secrets to the German Embassy in Paris, and was imprisoned on Devil's Island in French Guiana, where he spent nearly five years.  That woke up the French Jews.  

As a writer, he had written the truth, and had defined the Jews as a people whose assimilation was impracticable and whose plight would deteriorate owing to its social and economic position:  the solution was the founding of a Jewish state by international agreement.  He was an amazing Hellenized Jew in that he recognized the problem but solved it only as  Hellenized Jews were thinking, and that didn't reflect the body of the Jewish people.     He admitted that the territory must be chosen by the Jews but even Hertzl himself would vote for Palestine.  He was opposed by  the Hellenized Jews-assimilationists and the ultra Orthodox- who were waiting for the Moshiach to regain their homeland that G-d had first given them, the two extreme end positions.  What they both agreed on was the need for that which they had lost, their G-d given Homeland.  

The Hibbat Zion Movement was founded and produced much literature  which promoted the migration back to our Homeland.  This Return was crystalized with Herzl's movement of Return.  The Bilu Movement of Russian Jewish students was created out of this, and must have been the 1st Alliyah of 1882 who started agricultural settlements in Palestine.  Joining them was the Hoveve Zion who included handicraft production with farming.  

Baron Abraham Edmond Benjamin James de Rothschild was born on August 19, 1845, in the Paris suburb of Boulogne-Billancourt, Hauts-de-Seine, the third son of James (Ya’akov) and Betty (Batya) Rothschild, who headed the Paris branch of the Rothschild banking dynasty. 

By the 1890s, Baron Edmond de Rothchild supported Jewish colonies that were suffering financially, but he caused a lot of friction besides money.  In 1898 Herzl created the Jewish Colonial Trust.  He also created  by 1901 the Jewish National Fund, money to buy land in Palestine as the perpetual property of the Jewish people.  

Edmond became a leading proponent of the Zionist movement, promoting industrialization and economic development in Palestine. The Baron was asked for urgent assistance and he agreed to fund all the expenses of the colonies Rishon Le-Zion, Zichron Ya’akov, and Rosh Pina.  In 1883, he founded a Jewish settlement adjoining Aqir, which he named Mazkeret Batya (“Memorial [to] Batya”), in honor of his mother. In 1894, he bought a large tract of land for Jewish settlement in the Golan.

At the time, it was Turkey of the Ottoman Empire that was ruling over Palestine, and Herzl tried to get them to support his cause.  Ha also tried gain Germany, Britain and Russia to support him in this.  This only caused Russia to be extra cruel to its Jews.  The situation was so bad, that Herzl looked for a temporary solution (NACHTASYL) among other countries.  Settling in Uganda was rejected                      

He was born Benzion Mileikowsky in 1910 in Warsaw, then part of the Russian empire.  In 1933,  23 year old Benzion Miliekowsky wrote the fact that "Racial antisemitism is inciting a global war against the existence of the Jews, as a race that "poisons" human society", a thread that Hitler had used and that the Ayatollahs in Iran have picked up.  "Benzion continued, writing that "if racial antisemitism spread, it will not only endanger Jewish rights" (rights they only just were given by Napoleon) "but the existence of Jewish people everywhere."  Benzion was a Jewish historian, who would father 3 sons of which Benjamin Netanyahu would be the middle son.  Benzion Miliekowsky had made aliyah to Palestine and had changed his surname to Netanyahu.   He died at age 102.  

Meyer Levin wrote a historic novel, THE SETTLERS, about Jews first returning to Palestine and brings it up to WWI. a hardback copyrighted in 1972 of 832 pages. 

Meyer Levin (October 7, 1905 – July 9, 1981) was an American novelist. Perhaps best known for his work on the Leopold and Loeb case, Levin worked as a journalist (for the Chicago Daily News and, from 1933–1939, as an editor for Esquire).

 I was captivated on all pages.  Set in Palestine from the turn of the century to the Balfour Declaration, this novel revolves around a large Russian immigrant family facing a new life in a barren land. It covers over a quarter of a century of turbulent events:  the hardships of the 1st Jewish pioneers, the spasmodic tyranny of the Turkish overlords, the blighted relationship between neighboring Jews and Arabs, in which the wars of the present were foreordained in the blood feuds and hatreds of an earlier generation, the vast upheaval of the 1st World War and the Russian Revolution, the creation of a Jewish fighting force, the triumphant laying of the foundations for a new land.  

Anyone that was important in Zionism had been writers, journalists.  Journalists are so important, creators of our history.  That's why it's terrible when they fall down on the job and become the puppets of dishonest politicians.   The best journalist of all time that I have run across was Joan Peters who wrote "From Time Immemorial-the origins of the Arab-Jewish Conflict over Palestine, copyright 1984"  She had started her research actually commiserating with the Palestinian Arabs, but her research proved her wrong and she did not hide it.  It turned her around.  Her book has been ripped apart by dissonants like Norman Finkelstein and his pal, Noam Chomsky. 

Joan Peters was doing her job; going to original sources to find the information she needed, not to others' opinions.  Though the book is largely regarded as discredited in academic circles because of Chomsky and Finkelstein, who sadly, are Jews, it has had a politically significant legacy. Its central thesis, that Palestinians are not actually indigenous to the land, but the descendants of Arab immigrants from surrounding countries, is a common trope in contemporary Israeli  and world politics. In 2004, From Time Immemorial was the subject of another academic controversy, when Finkelstein accused Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz of largely plagiarizing his book The Case for Israel from it.  That shows that Dershowitz was in agreement with Joan Peters.  Joan wasn't Jewish. She had no horse in this race.    She just knew how to go to sources and did it, literally.  She lists all of them at the end of her book. She's an example of an honest journalist. Barbara Tuchman, famous historian,  wrote that the book was a historical event in itself.                                       

The Holocaust:  Jews murdered by gassing,  liquidation

Religious people say that this is the End of Times.  The Messiah will soon make his entrance.  Zionism created Israel.  I don't want to even think what would have happened if Israel had not been re-birthed on May 14, 1948.  

 Resource:

The New Standard Jewish Encyclopedia

Book:  Bibi by Benjamin Netanyahu

https://jewishreviewofbooks.com/articles/1129/zionisms-forgotten-father/#

https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/theodor-binyamin-ze-rsquo-ev-herzl

https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/baron-edmond-de-rothschild